Customer Reviews

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

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If I could cancel one murder and save one life from history, I'd save Bruno Schulz, killed by the Nazis in 1942. If I could save one lost book, I'd save Schulz's 'Messiah'. I can't. At least there is this book of strange treasures, Schulz's collected works. Actually, two books are included here: 'Street of Crocodiles' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass'.

The first, Schulz's masterpiece, is only 100 pages long. I could never choose a favorite book, but this is the one I reread most often. Any attempt by me to descibe its contents is a mockery. Reading it is like peering into a strange, dark painting: a mad father, a bewitching sister, a dark corner where something never before seen grows (almost) to life. This book may only take you a day to read, but I promise it will be a illumined and unforgettable day.

'Sanatorium', which I think was written earlier, seems in part a workshop for what 'Crocodiles' would become, but this is appropriate for Schulz: he is the master of life half-created: the life of mannequins, mad relatives, stuffed birds.

My only practical advice is: allow yourself to skim the surreal novella "Spring" if you get bogged down in it the first time you try. Just make sure you don't miss the rest of the stories!

There is nothing else like this book--and this one book is all there is. I envy anyone reading it for the first time.

It's unusual that I'm unprepared or taken by surprise by a book - years of haunting the cramped and poorly lit bookshelves of second hand shops as well as the thousands of dusty, musty blurbs and short introductions I've read over that time cast a broad net. Though I may not be on intimate terms with a particular author, all my research has led me to the assumption that I at least know of his literary cousins or other members of his extended family. This rather boneheaded approach to literature has no doubt led me to pass up certain worthy books under the mistaken impression that I've already absorbed them through some sort of bookshelf osmosis. On the flip side, though, I'm continually searching for relative unknowns and obscure authors, always looking for that feeling of discovery when my efforts are rewarded with someone truly unique.

And so it was with Bruno Schulz and the surreal dreamscape of his 'Street Of Crocodiles'. Previously unknown to me - it was actually this site that recommended him to me - but as I read through the reviews and picked out descriptions such as 'Kafkaesque', and 'Middle European' and others, a picture began to form in my mind. A picture that is, safe to say, completely insufficient to even begin describing what I actually found inside this strange and densely imagined book.

My own lightweight adjectives may add to the misinterpretation. First, I'd like to address the easiest one to correct - though 'The Street of Crocodiles' may adhere to the loosest definition of 'novel' (as some have described it), when I tried to read it as such, I was nearly overwhelmed trying to arrange it into a coherent picture in my mind. Only after a second reading, taking each titled section as an isolated event, was I able to glean a better understanding of (what I believe to be) Shulz's patterns and aims. Both 'The Street of Crocodiles' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass' are constructed the same way - the characters of each story generally remain the same, as does the setting and the style, except the apparent death of a family member at the conclusion of one story does not preclude his appearance in the next.

In fact, Schulz revisits the demise of his father over and over again, in both collections. Trying to read either 'Crocodiles' or 'Sanatorium' then in the manner of a traditional narrative is mind-bendingly awkward, even allowing for the possible flux of an unreliable narrator.

And except for the notable exception of the story "Spring", from 'Sanatorium', I don't think that the unreliable narrator was Schulz's aim. Though almost every story takes off on a flight of fantasy and unreality, I think he was looking for another way of getting at the truth - truth as seen through the eyes of a child, or the truth that is so demanding at the moment we wake up from a dream, but fades as consciousness returns. In order to immerse us in such conditions, Schulz indulges in surprising, fantastic, sometimes nonsensical imagery - and by this constant barrage of word pictures and metaphor, he jolts me out of my mundane sense of structure I've built up over the years. I've read how some people compare this to the Magic Realism of modern Latin American writers, and I'm probably not qualified to make a comparison, but I will say this - I don't think Schulz's intention was ever to depart from reality. It's only that the reality that he was trying to portray is from a perspective that is so different from the accepted version. If magic happens in Schulz's writing, it's because that's the way his character saw it.

There are times when it all seems too much, as if he's overplayed his hand. One of my biggest hurdles to finishing this collection was how Schulz could elicit such a dramatic sensation in a paragraph that my mind would skip along this tangent trail as I continued to read but not comprehend. That is until I'd come back to my senses and have absolutely no idea what was happening. In a lesser work, I can do this and not really miss much. With Schulz, there is no skimming. It's full immersion or nothing.

This sort of writing isn't for everyone. The reader who prefers his authors to stick to reality will toss this book away quickly. Its structure is not built around a typical story arc - its more as if he's trying to portray an alternate mirror world that needs its own language in order to transport the reader there. But once we arrive at that vantage point, we can then look back through the mirror at our former life and see it anew in all its twisted vain wonder.

Some of the most beautiful writing of the 20th century is contained in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. Although he has not yet received the recognition here in the West that he deserves, his writings are every bit as mystifying and powerful as Kafka's. As others have stated, this one volume contains all of Shulz's stories that are essential reading. This is the one to buy, other collections are always only about half of what you should be getting.

The works of Bruno Schulz are definitely five star, I cannot highly recommend this enough.

Bruno Schulz emerged from the now-vanished world of "Middle Europa". He left an indelible, but largely unrecognized stamp on modern literature.

Schulz's work is probably unique, not only in its artistic insights, but also in its precociousness relative to contemporary novelistic styles and preferences: the writing is redolent of twisted dreams, bizarre, fantastic and hallucinatory metaphors, queer observations, evocatively strange insights and, when combined with his Goya-like drawings, generates a perversely weird and haunting series of short novels.

His work seems to prefigure South American "magical realism", though the "supernaturalism" of that genre differs from Schulz's preoccupations. It has certain parallels to some of Kafka's work ("Metamorphosis" and "In the Penal Colony" come to mind) though the two writers were unknown to each other. The pure strangeness also evokes certain members of the school of early 20th century fantasy writers such as Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake. Frankly, if Albert Hoffman's pharmacologic discovery was known to Schultz, I would attribute some of the startling writing to a ergot-induced dream state.

Regrettably, Schulz was tragically, like so many others, consigned to a tragic and early oblivion by the Nazis. As a coda to that fact, an SS officer was so taken with Schultz's drawings that he extended him "special protection" in so far as he was permitted a small life outside the death ambit proscribed for non-conformers to National Socialist intellectual, cultural, religious and other rigid proscriptions. Frankly, he would not have prospered under the Stalinist brand of Marxism, either.

Despite his untimely end, his small body of work will likely garner critical acclaim as long as serious literature merits intelligent scrutiny. If you are entranced by the paintings of Heironymous Bosch and transfixed by the "Caprices" etchings of Goya; if you appreciate the strange, wonderful and exotic in literature, you should find tremendous gratification in Schulz.

Shulz is a revelation. One must read Shulz for his florid and juicy language. It will make the reader envious and look more critically at the work of other writers. Of course, I read this book in English translation rather than the original Polish. For the record, Shulz was Polish, but had he not been murdered by a Nazi, he would today be Ukrainian. If his words are as beautiful and bursting with color, light and air in the original Polish as they are in English, he truly was a master. He creates expressions that are alive and on the money, e.g. "popping with the soft sound of crushed grasshoppers". The translator deserves kudos for being able to be so expressive in English. Shulz reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald in that his language is so beautiful and expressive that one reads and enjoys him without worrying too much about where the tales take one. I recommmend Shulz for anyone who enjoys beautiful, magnificent language and I commend the translator for losing nothing of the original grandeur of Shulz's work.

The Street of Crocodiles: and Other Stories is a collection of interesting, wonderful and beautiful short stories, written by the late, great Bruno Schulz. It contains 33 stories in all, and each and every one was an absolute pleasure to read. I couldn't get enough.

Bruno Shultz was a painter first, and teacher of art, and his talent for producing fine paintings shows through in his writing. In this book, each story is itself like a beautiful painting, only applied to the paper with ink and words instead of paint and brushes on canvas. Personally, I have never read anything like these stories, and I know my short review can't possibly do this book any real justice. But I will say this, if you haven't read anything by Bruno Schulz, and you are in the mood for something truly interesting, and beautiful and written in the style of high literature, I mean literature at its very best, then read The Street of Crocodiles: and Other Stories. If only Bruno Schulz would have survived WW-II, I'm sure he would have been awarded the very highest honors for his literary talent. I give it five stars.

My father survived World War II hiding in a bunker under the town of Drohobych, so I feel eerily connected to this man and his work.

It would be fair to call Bruno Schulz Poland's greatest twentieth century writer. This collection of stories changes the very definition of what a short story should be. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, yes, but the writing is best described as delirious, hypnotic, dreamlike. You don't read Schulz for the plot; you read for the prose, the intensely sensual visuals, the way the words unfurl like the leaves of a magical vine. Inanimate objects struggle to come to life. Secret rooms grow strange, trapped gardens. A boy blows away with a gust of wind. His father conjures a flock of exotic birds from the pages of a picture book.

The details of his life are the stuff of legend. Bruno Schulz was a shy, frail, brilliant artist, living in the far eastern Polish town of Drohobych. When his father died, he took on the job of art teacher at the local high school to support his mother, sister and nephew.

Drohobych was a particularly brutal place to be in the cauldron of World War II. Thousands of Jews were marched into the nearby forests and killed, or transported to Treblinka to be gassed. For a year, he found an improbable protector and patron in the person of Felix Landau, an art-loving Nazi whose war diary is well known. The artist and writer Bruno Schulz, a man so gentle that he fed flies sugar water so that they would survive the winter, was shot to death on November 19, 1942, at the intersection of Czaki and Mickiewicz Streets, on the eve of his planned escape.

These lushly worded stories give no warning of the conflagration that is to follow, but the reader's knowledge of Schulz's fate inescapably informs every line. Read "The Street of Crocodiles" if you're interested in what was lost in the fires of the Holocaust, read it if you want to be consumed by fiction that burns like poetry. But please, read this book.

A most wonderful discovery. For a mental map of the world of this marvelous writer, you could think of roots in Andersen's fairy tales, in Frankenstein fantasies, Jung's archetypes, Freud's dreams and nightmares, de Sade's philosophical attempts, Sacher-Masoch's dominant women, Kafka's strange worlds (right down to a proper metamorphosis), Anton Reichenow's ornithological guide books with their engravings, Gombrowicz's strange worlds (BS illustrated Ferdyduke), you might even suspect Thomas Mann to have his fingers in it.
Shoots are found in Danilo Kis, or even in Salman Rushdie. One could see him as an ancestor of magical realism, but one should not blame him for that. One can also look at the theatre of the absurd.
The man was working and living his artificially shortened life at the cross-roads of the inter-war avant-garde, in a Polish backwater. Schulz was a graphic artist and a writer in the Polish language, living and dying in a Jewish town that was Austrian at his birth, became Polish, was Soviet occupied, and then Nazi occupied at the time of his death, and later became Ukrainian.
His death was absurd and tragically in line with the time: he was shot by a Nazi officer who met him outside the Jewish Ghetto, which he was not allowed to leave (except that he had been hired by a Gestapo officer to paint a mural inside his house; those paintings are now on show in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, after a controversial transfer.)
I must admit I never heard of him until maybe a year or two ago, when I read Danilo Kis, the Serbian author of `Garden, Ashes' and other masterpieces. If you never heard of Schulz, you may not be alone.

Schulz published just two story collections during his lifetime. The two are included in this Penguin edition. The edition also includes his illustrations to some of the stories.
The cover page of this book is taken from his graphics collection `A Booke of Idolatry'. It shows a woman putting her foot in a man's face. Women with powers are frequent in his stories, like the housemaid Adela. The Idolatry book seems to be mostly about similar images. You can visit his gallery at one of the dedicated websites.

The book might with justification also be called a novel, with named short chapters offered as stories. The narrator is a boy whose mother runs a shop, and whose father is staying home, sick and dying, and doing crazy things. But the stories don't follow a time line. In one story the father has died, in a following one he is in the shop again. Or maybe he hasn't died properly, just morphed into a cockroach and come back.
Father is a philosopher and heresiarch, a secondary would-be demiurge (not being content with creating tailor's dummies, he also dabbles at creating immortality by doing away with the principium individuationis, or simpler said by converting individuals into matter - alas with damaging consequences). Man is only a transit station for electrical currents!
Adela shows up in most stories and does naughty things. Father fears her. Shop assistants lust for her.
Birds are frequent. One of my favorite stories is called `Birds', an absurd tale about a man creating an aviary inside the family house by hatching exotic bird eggs and cross-breading the outcome, until Adela cleans up. Many of the stories do not tell a tale, really, but give us images and situations, without anything `happening'. Others are like dream tales; for instance the Cinnamon Shops, which provided the original title. The title Street of Crocodiles was chosen for the American edition.
All poetry, in Schulz's view, is based on the discovery of ancient mythical relations between things.
The second story collection, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, is in a way a sequel, dealing with the same people, in the centre father and son, who are now explicitly known as Jakob and Joseph. And don't forget Adela.
There are more recognizable elements of memoirs. Joseph meets Bianca, a childhood girlfriend. He discovers his talent and passion for drawing. He discovers the marvels of stamps: they show us that Franz Josef I was not the ruler of the whole world!
These subjects seem to sound like any other boy's stories, but believe me, Schulz does it differently.
I notice I am stretching this too long and cut it short here. Go for it!

Not for me. Too much imagination. Too much description. Pages of summer day words. If Mozart used too many notes (Salieri in Amadeus), then Schulz uses too many words, too many thoughts.

Perhaps, when youth actually was a descriptor of me. Perhaps, when I thought reading Ulysses meant something, then Street would draw me. Perhaps, I would compare Schulz to a Dr. Seuss who might meet Proust on a dirty street while on crystal. Hmmmm. Perhaps not.

Of course, action occurs. The short stories are not a still life. A random typical selection: "My mother rushed in, frightened, and enfolded my screams with her arms, wanting to stifle them like flames and choke them in the warmth of her love ... The large colored picture painted on the front of the stove grew bloodred; it puffed itself up like a turkey, and in the convulsions of its veins, sinews, and all its swollen anatomy...." It exhausts you as you read. Each paragraph pushes you to imagine, and if you don't, the words were wasted. You failed.

Yes, you think you must master the vision of each sentence, drink the phrases, savor the words. Far too much work for a former engineer like me. Certainly, Alice would say so, even in Wonderland. Yet, the joy of the work. Truly.

This book should be available in all bookstores amongst other classics. Unique prose of Bruno Schulz, stories of everyday life in Drohobycz viewed from a perspective of a boy, is poetic and almost fantastic. Penguin's paperback "The Street of Crocodiles" also presents other Schulz's book : "Sanatorium under the sign of an hourglass", and is definitely a convenient way to get familiar with the writer, at a good price.